ABBEY MUZA

“Weaving is an act of masochism,” says Abbey Muza, for whom carefully layered subtleties far outweigh surface delights. Muza’s textiles field a dance of image and word, articulating a sensual, multilayered relationship between the poetic, the visual, and the tactile.

Inspired by the lives of early 20th century queer artists and the writings of French authors and philosophers, such as the poet Georges Bataille in Visions of Excess, Muza is interested in finding beauty and attractiveness among the uncomfortable, the grotesque, and the unexpected. In their textiles, images that are barely discernible at first glance seem to come into sharper focus the longer the viewer sits with the work. With sensuous and dreamlike wefts of pink, burgundy, purple, celeste, and hazy off-white, the works give rare moments of clarity to visceral, almost indescribable vignettes: fleeting images of play violence among pets, a glass of wine carefully and dutifully refilled, the feeling of falling in love.

Muza’s approach to weaving highlights and heightens the dimensionality of the textile. It is a medium that in other circumstances, the artist recognizes, could easily lend itself to “safer” modes of viewing and interpretation – hung on a wall like a painting, a flat surface where the topography of overlapping brush strokes strain all too often against the limitations of canvases and frames. But that is not the case here. Though Muza begins the creation of each new object with a rough idea in mind, the initial step in their process is the digital encoding of a huge abstract pattern of black and white pixels, which oftentimes bears scant resemblance to the final product created using a Jacquard loom. The artist allows for the machine to select certain threads to be elevated during the course of the weaving process, altering the image. Abstract digital information turns into something analog, tangible, legible – but never quite in the same way twice.

Muza embraces these small moments of uncertainty and then frees the object from the wall itself, using the products from their loom almost as a scaffolding for more nuanced theorizations – borne out in their practice – on the capability of image, text, and weave to mutually support each other. To this end, one textile encoded with the image of a small, yappy dog also includes an excerpt from an interview with the Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela in the magazine View on Colour, in which he muses on the evocative byproducts of the creative process: “What is red? A blush, a flush, a fever, a command… What is texture? A result of time”

DIVINE AND DARLING; INVERSIONS DEVIENT URANIA; SET OUT SAUCERS FOR ANIMALS AND I TOO WILL GROW CLAWS

(above, l-r)

Silk, wool, cotton, organza, enamel, wood, gesso on panel.

Dimensions variable.

Installation view.

Photo credit: Neighboring States

JUNKING PULSES; THE SEA; A BLUSH, A FLUSH, A FEVER, A COMMAND

(right, l-r)

Silk, wool, cotton, organza, enamel, wood, gesso on panel.

Dimensions variable.

Installation view.

Photo credit: Neighboring States

FAR OUTWEIGH SURFACE DELIGHTS.

Dimensions variable.

Installation view.